Check us out in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance!

Carnival of Personal Finance #152 is live at Money Under 30 this week. Many thanks to David at Money Under 30 for including us!

Articles I enjoyed:

• Focused on the Future at Dreaming of Ferraris
• How to have fun and stay frugal at basicfinancial
• CVS: Why roll over ECBs? at Chief Family Officer
• Millionaires drive minivans at Wide Open Wallet
• Roadmap To A Better Financial Health at Moolanomy
• Your Money’s Guide to the 2008 Presidential Elections–Taxes at Dough Roller
• Easy Ways To Track Travel Expenses and Stick To Your Vacation Budget at Delicious Baby

There is a whole lotta coffee drinking in this house. We have two coffee makers. Mostly that is because I do not like it when my coffee tastes like coffee so I only drink the flavored kind. Riley, on the other hand, would probably throw a bunch of coffee beans in a cheek in a pinch. She can even drink nasty work coffee.

When we moved about a year and a half ago we got two shiny, new coffee pots. They were the same model and they were Black & Decker. They did not even last a year before malfunctioning. Mine broke first. Apparently, this is a theme that you will soon notice. So, when it broke I went out in search of a new coffee maker at Wal-Mart. Either I am a complete douche or just was not thinking as I bought another Black & Decker coffee maker. I ended up keeping it because what are the chances that it would malfunction too?

About a month later was when Riley’s coffee maker died. She was smarter than me and got a nice Mr. Coffee one.

And today, about six to nine months after replacing the first Black & Decker coffee maker I had to replace the second one. You see, the second one had a malfunction as well.

Today though I knew better than to get suckered by a Black & Decker coffee maker. I looked longingly at the $79 Kitchen Aid one and the $59 Hamilton Beach one. Then I bought a cheapie $14.99 Proctor Silex one. And hopefully it is not made by Black & Decker.

In the past year and a half we have spent $100 on coffee makers. I should have just got a nice expensive one to begin with.

PS - Don’t buy Black & Decker coffee makers!

Student loans bite. Specifically those blasted private loans that I got suckered into at the University of Central Florida. Oh yes, I am calling you out Financial Aid Office People at UCF. Argh!

If you do not have any private student loans, let me share the pain of them with you for a moment. Private student loans have a variable interest rate. Private student loans do not come with that whole ability to defer them like you can with regular student loans. If you want to defer your private student loans for any reason (job loss, attending school again, etc) you have to cough up $150 for the deferment. You also cannot consolidate private student loans without going through this whole process of applying for a new loan where you get a hard pull on your credit report and so on. And you are not guaranteed that you will get the consolidation as it is based on creditworthiness.

I can think of only two pluses to private student loans. One, if you declare bankruptcy you can declare these unlike regular student loans. Two, thanks to the Fed lowering the rate I have seen a rate decrease on these loans.

I currently have a total of 5 private loans with Sallie Mae. And the average interest rate is 7.8% right now. And that total amount is currently around $31,500. That sad thing is looking at each of those loans and seeing that I owe more than the original loan! The smallest loan has a balance of $3,437 but the original balance was $2,000.

It gets worse though. When I look at my payment plan it shows that I will end up paying something like $40,000 in interest by the time I get them paid off. My payment plan has them paid off in October of 2028.

Wow, that means that I will be 51 years old when my student loans are paid off. If that is not sad, then I do not know what is.

I am so having the best freebie week ever. Just check out a few of my freebies below.

Pretty impressive, eh? And I totally did not put all the freebies in the pic!

Okay, so this week I got…

I got a free celebration charm from Lean Cuisine. I found out about this freebie from SlickDeals. It’s a cute little charm and it was totally free. You can still sign up for one.

I got some free Oil of Olay (just a sample size) from Vocal Point.

I got a free $5 gift card from Guitar Center for doing a short little survey a few weeks ago. I dunno how or why I got to do that survey. I am on their mailing list and they randomly sent me a thing asking if I would do a survey in exchange for the gift card. Who would say no that?

The 12-pack of water is a sad story. You see, yesterday we went to Target so Riley could drop off a prescription. It was pouring rain and that water was sitting on the bottom of a shopping cart in the cart return thingie. I commented on it and drove on past. Then Riley said to go get it cause Target would just put it back on the shelf and re-sell it. She was probably right, so I got it before Target did. But it sucks for the person that forgot it

The Pledge Wipes are exciting. Every time I get my little email from Clean Home Journal I eagerly reply to try to win the gift pack. This time I did win! Woot, woot! My prize was the 25-pack Pledge Multi-surface wipes as well as a bunch of coupons. How exciting.

And I also managed to talk Riley into crawling under the vending machine at her work twice in pursuit of forgotten coins that she saw under there. (one was a nickel and one was a dime).

And that is the best freebie week ever.

My car insurance is up for renewal in June. I was thinking about this the other day and wondered if I had ever gotten around to changing the mailing address when we moved in February. I had not, so I completed a little address change online. This simple task cost me about $75.00.

Here is an email I just got:

Thank you for visiting the Allstate Customer Care Site. Your request to change your address has been processed effective 05/06/2008. Please allow 2-3 days for the change to reflect on your policy. As a result of this change and new rates in effect, your policy premium has increased by $74.12. The adjusted policy premium is $500.46.

Uh, wow. That sucks. I am wondering if they would let me change it back, even though I don’t live at that address any more?

I do not really know much about car insurance or the insurance industry in general. I do know that they tie your rate to your credit, which makes no sense whatsoever and I can’t believe people haven’t raised a stink about it. I also know that my credit score has went up considerably in the past 6 months. I also know that changing your address can make your premium change. I suspect it has something to do with the number of claims filed in your zip code or something. However, I have never had this much of an increase when changing addresses. And I would have thought that the credit score increase might have evened things out somewhat.

You know, I don’t like driving this much.  I don’t like my car. I don’t like the price of gas. I don’t like the price of maintenance and I don’t like this insurance increase or the price of insurance to begin with.

With the price of gas being almost literally arm and a leg I think that fuel consumption is likely to be on a lot of people’s minds. Tons of bloggers are giving tips on how to cut down your fuel costs. Apparently, the easiest way to do that is to slow down. An article on CNN stated that “every 10 miles per hour you drive over 60 is like the price of gasoline going up about 54 cents a gallon.” Yikes. As someone that regularly drives around 70mph or a bit more, that is, well, tragic news.

As the gas prices have been creeping up I have been slowing down. The speed limit on the interstate here is a disappointing 65mph. And you do not have to go too far before it changes to 55 mph. Guess who obeys the speed limit now? Me!

There are a lot of cops here with very sneaky hiding places. So, this slowing down things has likely saved me more than just gasoline. I have avoided speeding tickets and there have been times recently where I came up on a sneaky cop and knew I would have been toast if the gas prices were better.

So, that got me to thinking. If loads of other people out there are slowing down as well to save on gas, what are the cops doing? I suspect they are writing less tickets for speeding now. Wonder if they are bored?

Somehow I managed to miss the fact that we are cool enough for The Broke And Need Money Carnival 2 last week. And they totally are not scared of our name. A fun carnival with a fun name and a hysterical theme. Check it out if you also missed it last week. Many thanks to Hook Me Up! for including us!

Also check us out in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance up at the Alpha Consumer blog at US News & World Report. By not being able to print our name they made us appear very mysterious. Or very naughty. You decide. Regardless, many thanks to Kimberly for including us this week!

And also find us at Tax Carnival #36: A Cinco de Mayo Tax Celebration at Don’t Mess with Taxes. And at the 58th Carnival of Money Stories at Free From Broke.

Be sure to check out all the great articles in the carnivals this week!

Last week I entered one of our posts into a blog carnival. It was not a great post, so I was unsure if it would make it into the carnival.

It did not. However it was not due to the quality of the content. It’s all thanks to my idea of a clever domain name…

I’m sorry, but I can’t include you in the carnival of personal finance until you get a family friendly domain name.

Yes, it is true. Shafted due to domain name. Isn’t censorship funny? And isn’t “family friendly” much like beauty and “in the eye of the beholder?”

If you’d like a refresher course on family-friendliness, check out what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Entertainment or information is called “family friendly” if it considered suitable for the whole family. In particular it means that it is not considered harmful for children, which may imply restrictions on engagement in, or depiction of, nudity, sex, violence, horror, crude language, etc.

Consider this a shout-out to all of the children out there reading this, a personal finance blog, because kids love those.

And for the record, we harbor no hostility towards families - just giraffes and hedgehogs.

Last Thursday I signed up for a free trial of Rhapsody. I only did so because it was a special offer I got in a MyPoints email and I am all about getting free stuff through MyPoints. If you are not already a member of MyPoints, what are you waiting for? Join MyPoints NOW! Seriously. You can get free gas cards from them, among other things. In fact, that Rhapsody free trial I did gave me half the number of points needed for one $10 gas card from MyPoints. But that is beside the point.

With Rhapsody you get a two week free trial. I decided to cancel it today while I was thinking about it. I did not want to forget and end up with a charge on my credit card - because you have to give a credit card for the free trial to start. And supposedly you get to use the account until the trial period is up.

Prior to signing up for Rhapsody I had done a free trial of Napster’s online music service. I preferred Napster when it was a file sharing site When I was using Napster I noticed that a lot of the things that I was looking for just plain were not available. I wanted to hear the Andrea Corr solo album - not there. I wanted to hear the latest Beth Hart album - not there. I wanted to hear the latest Aly & AJ album - it was there! But wait - only 3 of the songs were available for full listening. The remainder of the album just offered 30-second clips and you had to pay $0.99 per song for the entire song. Balls to that.

With Rhapsody I was able to find the things that I could not find on Napster. So, score for Rhapsody!

Both sites offered downloadable software as well as allowing you to play the music from their site. I tried out both options with each service. Napster would sometimes get a bit sluggish when searching for what I wanted. I did not have that problem with Rhapsody. However, with Rhapsody I did have the problem of the audio buffering, only it was more like skipping. That was a real problem. Of course, that could have been contributed to the memory hogging programs I was using at the time.

When it came time to cancel, Napster was a piece of cake. If you are still in your free trial period, you can cancel without needing to call anyone. That is a real bonus. I was not so fortunate with Rhapsody. Not only do you have to call Rhapsody to cancel, but actually finding the number was quite a chore. So, if you need to cancel Rhapsody, you just call 1-866-597-5465. Be warned though that their customer service is clearly farmed out to India, which was a little frustrating. However, I was pleased with how quickly I was able to cancel.

Both services state that even if you cancel before the trial period is up that you can still access the service. With Napster, this was totally true. With Rhapsody, not so much. My trial period with Rhapsody does not end until May 9th but my access is already disabled.

While both Rhapsody and Napster had their positives and negatives, I think that Napster came out the winner in the end. But I would not pay for either service personally. Get a 14-Day Free Trial to Rhapsody if you are interested.

I am pretty stoked about the so-called economic stimulus checks. I have no plans to stimulate the economy though. I plan on using it to pay down a little debt.

So, when I read that the checks were coming early I got excited. You see, my last two digits are “06″ and this week they were sending out money for “00″ to “20″ so I was expecting that money early in the week.

Yesterday it still had not shown up in my account. I was getting nervous here.

Luckily there is a toll-free IRS stimulus check status hotline that you can call for updates. All you need to do is call 1-866-234-2942. Enter in a small amount info (your social, your filing status and your exemptions) and then it tells you when your check is to be deposited.

I called it last night and it said my stimulus check is being deposited today.

I just checked my account - score! It’s there!

So, if your economic stimulus check is MIA, just call 1-866-234-2942 before getting all worried like I did.

Want some free money? Get $25 for free when you sign up with Revolution Money Exchange by May 15, 2008!